The Opposite of Life is Suffering

In my last post I wrote:

"The Jesus who felt the agonies of every creature (laid out most distinctly in the observations of evolution and its eons); the Jesus who knows of agonies or not in the pre-biotic gasses, dusts, and molten stones; the Jesus who knows of agonies or not in a yawning, aching truly infinite prospect of time not beginning and not ending--this Jesus is the Jesus through whom Creation was made."

This is really just the specific application of what would be--on any sober reflection--simply a prudent maxim about considerations of God.  If God feels something, can it be said that he feels it only finitely?  Indeed, any notion of proportion in any aspect of existence must be imposed by divine will--infinitude must be the default setting, as it were, of anything attributable to God.

The notion of Jesus suffering, then, must be understood in its limited particular applications to human experience as an imposition by God--by divine will the suffering Jesus is brought to us in Scripture and in our creaturely experiences more or less acutely.  In "more or less" is encapsulated the lamentable fact that our recollections of Jesus' suffering might easily be more than we can bear, and yet it must be thought simultaneously that we could never really recall Jesus' sufferings often enough, or acutely enough.

And we must recall also that Jesus admonishes us to surrender our lives to the service of his teachings and his mission--we are called to "take up the Cross."  Simultaneously, of course, Jesus wishes for us "the abundant life."  It cannot be recalled too often that this abundance is to be attended by persecutions.  Here, of course, we are confronted by a crossroads, by an opportunity (if we might call it that) to decide upon competing frameworks of "Christian life."  On the one hand, we can say that to "take up the Cross" is to suffer the loss of life throughout, and in such case "the abundant life" is found in rejoicing that earthly blessings are bestowed in general upon humanity--with all of humanity's shortcomings.  We can count ourselves lords of the earth if it matters not to us who in particular gets the blessings, if we count all blessings apportioned to us personally by happenstance to be more than our due (and with our fellow humans to be thanked along with God), and also if the deathly "Cross" admonition results in a life-long exercise in strengthened self-abnegation and forbearance of persecution.

On the other hand, we can decide that to "take up the Cross" in the "abundant life" means to gather the fruits and comforts of the world--couched as the bestowals of a generous God to his faithful.  In such a framework of "doing the will of God" the deathly part of "taking up the Cross" need mean little more than a professed anticipated willingness for eventual martyrdom at the hands of a secular police state, and "persecution" can take the form of being disallowed a majoritarian prayer at a public-school ceremony financed by the taxes of all.

As I have written before, the neat notion of polar opposites (such as "light" and "darkness") is often inadequate in describing the reality that God created.  (When God created light, he was in no way disempowered to create light to suffuse all.  From that moment, it would be as logical as anything to think of darkness as being drawn from light--the "separated" light and dark not being opposites, but rather dark as an extracted element of the default light granted to the universe by its infinite Lord.)  This refusal of conventional notions of opposites can apply to this discussion of life and death.

Of course, we say often enough that death is a part of life.  Moreover, the notions of "life" and "death" are of multiple applications in the religious realm--"mortal sin," "death of the soul," "the second death" and the like--as well as the notion of "eternal life."  Scarcely a person in the Western World has avoided the observation that Christians strive for "eternal life" as an alternative to living eternally in Hell.  What is most important here, however, is not the realization that life and death are not opposites, but rather a recognition of what, in the teachings of Jesus, might be best understood as the opposite of life.

The opposite of life is suffering.  The dead live eternally or suffer eternally.  If the opposite of life is suffering, and Jesus tells us to give up our lives, then what matters most in the midst of our suffering is the bolstering understanding that God made Creation as a blessing for us.  This is the infinitely good God that gives us as well the potential to count as more blessed than anything a cup of cold water (for who would dare to calculate the times in history when this has been undeniably so) and God somehow makes it possible for a blessed few of us to have handed a lone cup to a parched little one--and rejoiced in God's inestimable blessings.  This is life lived abundantly.

For Jesus made life for us out of suffering.  The divine made the not-divine for a reason, and if the reason was love then it was attended by a reason of felt lack, and both that love and that lack must be understood by us as infinite.  Here we must go to the preface of John.  We read:

"All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.  In him was life; and the life was the light of men."

Jesus poured out life for the universe, through his unimaginable sufferings.

If we look at the verses above, moreover, we are confronted by a truth even more shattering than the realization that life's opposite is suffering (as though that were not enough, and as though we might ever comprehend the implications of Jesus' sufferings.)  The verse "In him was life; and the life was the light of men," presents in twelve KJV words the reason why conventional Christianity is deficient.  The Christianity of all those celebrated centuries has acted as though what has always mattered most immediately is that Jesus brought light, and that the light of God's truth has been what has given life to the saved.

The Light that brings Life is inestimable to humanity, but who can ignore that the Preface to the Gospel of John (written to those after the "Fall" and declaring that the darkness has never been able to overpower the light) tells us that the life procured for us at such a price by Jesus is what is "the light of men"?  Creation is good, it has always been good, and the life that Jesus poured out for Creation has always been a blessing--and a light--to humanity,  Humanity has looked at the good Creation, and tried to understand good, and tried to be good.  Indeed, all of Creation, in attempting to act out its innate drives, has always tried (though imperfectly) to be good.  Even a fig tree can be bad or good, and Jesus can be understood to be both sane and just when he acts accordingly.

Jesus did not merely clothe the grass of the field with glories greater than Solomon, he endowed the lowly grass as well with the drive to thrust itself toward the sunlit heavens in a frenzy of vigor.  Again and again Jesus admonishes us to understand life, and the God who gives life, and the mercies to be sought for eternal life, in terms of the generosity of God toward his creatures.  This generosity was expressed for us in the sufferings of Jesus from time immemorial.  Jesus is so much more than his inestimable sufferings on Calvary, and Jesus' teachings are so much more than our speculations about how and why he did what he did.